Designer. Gamer. Storyteller.

Five: Board Game-Week 2

For this week, I focused on the aesthetic aspect of the board game. In this instance it’s just the look of the game, and kicking around a few concepts. Just to remind you, I want to make a board game that allows us to dispel some of the more popular stereotypes surrounding Black women.

These two board games are highly successful precedents that I’ll be using to organize my thoughts and how I want game play to be. For now, i wanted to get an idea of how to work through this.

Well, in order to make the concept subtle, I decided that the main characters would be Orc women from the vessel “Five.”

(There are only four I know, but I was kicking around ideas)

The Five is named such because it can only accommodate five passengers. When the women of the Five leave a planet, they can take no refugees, offer no sanctuary, and no positions. Whatever issues take place on that planet must be resolved then and there.

In addition, each girl is a representative of her planet and they all work together as and intergalactic taskforce for the Galaxy of Sult.

Each has different abilities, and a different outlook based on where they came from.

The colors indicate the planets each character originates from.

I initially created a board that color coated each character in their role and the goal was that you roll a dice on the board and if you land on your color, you can perform an action. It was intended that all characters could equally move around because I wanted to create some frustration to reinforce the limited mobility Black women feel in these caricatures.

However, I later revised. I want it to be a bit deeper than that.

So I introduced the three cards.

Instead of a movement style game, I decided I want the players to be able to choose the Boss, Environment, and a Story accompanying each action. I was inspired by Sentinels of Multiverse and how every bands together to defeat a great evil.

At the beginning of the game, the players roll to decide who selects their character first.

THEN. That same player selects a Terra card, which lets you know which planet the adventure will take place. Then there is a story card that will explain how you ended up in that situation. And then you will select the boss card corresponding to that planet to tell you who the big baddy is.

In order to do this, that meant I needed to create some BADASS characters, that compliment each other.

So since this is still aesthetic, here are the concepts for my characters.

The art used is not mine, and was obtained through DeviantArt, Pinterest, and Google Images.Trying to pin down an exact artist has been a bit of challenge, but some of the art is signed, so I will leave it as be. This is after all for a class and not intended for monetary gain. Yet. Should it prove to be lucrative I will find an artist and commission new images. Until then?

THIS IS THE TEAM

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Here are their abilities as of late, and their attributes. Keep in mind each is supposed to have a subtle commentary.

Examples:

Sabwa can charge through anything, but it harms her internally in the long run because losing HP is nothing, losing your attack power permanently? Not a small sacrifice.

Mam can’t attack directly. She can only do it underhandedly through poisoning or help others.

Welf can only suck the health out of the system and in best case direct all the attacks toward herself.

Sapphire can only attack and has no defense capabilities. She’s just an angry missile.

Jez uses her sexuality to make others fight her battles.

Starting to get my drift?

After forming the characters up a bit more, I updated the board.

Sample Set Up:

So now you can see the corresponding planet, but I’m still thinking about how to actually make the board more than pretty. What is it useful for?